|
|
||
Silencing the Da Vinci Code
hristian groups want The Da Vinci Code banned. A pliant Censor Board of India insists on a disclaimer at the beginning and end saying the film is “a work of pure fiction and has no correspondence to historical facts of the Christian religion.” The Censor Board did not insist on any such disclaimer when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with its vividly anti-Semitic libels, was released. So, the Censor Board considers the story the Christian Bible peddles as historically accurate, and Dan Brown’s story as a fiction. For either version of the Jesus story to be true or false, there must be historical evidence that Jesus existed. As Professor G. A. Wells demonstrates, there is none.[i] Historians of that period have recorded events in detail, yet they are unaware of Jesus Christ, who remains an elusive and shadowy figure.
Is the Christian story credible?
How credible is the Jesus story the Christian Bible tells? It claims:
This is the outline of the story the canonical gospels tell. Luke (2:2) claims that Jesus was born when Quirinius carried out the census in 6 CE. Matthew (2:1) claims that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, who had died in 4 BCE. Should we believe Luke or Matthew?
The canonical gospel writers pretend to be eyewitnesses to what Jesus supposedly did. But they are unfamiliar with Palestine or the Hebrew language. This is illustrated by the title they bestow upon Jesus: Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 2:23). Josephus wrote extensively about every city and town of Palestine but does not mention a place called Nazareth. As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip shows, in those days, there was a sect of Gnostics called Nazarenes, meaning those who reveal inner secrets.[ii] Ignorant gospel writers mistook that for a place name, and made it Jesus’ hometown!
Until after the time of Justin Martyr (~150 CE), no Christian writer even used the word gospel.[iii] Only the Gnostics did. Martyr does not mention the four canonical gospels. The celebrated philosopher, Celsus (~ 170 CE), mentions the gospels of Helen, Mariamme, Salome etc, but is completely unaware of the four canonical gospels.[iv] A little later, Irenaeus declares, “It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer than in number than they are, for there are four zones of the world and four principal winds.”[v] This illustrates the shaky foundations upon which the four ‘authentic’ gospels were built. From there on, the Church systematically suppressed all the other gospels as heresy. For example, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE) tells us that originally three gospels of Mark existed. Only one of those made it to the Christian Bible. The four canonical gospels themselves were repeatedly edited, and attained their current shape only in the fourth century CE. The oldest, fairly complete manuscript of the Christian Bible is also from the fourth century CE.[vi]
It is evident that the early Gnostic Christians practised the ritual of symbolic death by crucifixion. It was meant to destroy one’s identification with the body and realize the true self within. Gnostics considered Christ allegoric and not as a historical person. Paul, a Gnostic later appropriated by the Church, declares, “The secret is this: Christ in you (Colossians 1:25-28.)” Paul makes it clear that Jesus was merely an allegory when he declares, “If Jesus had been on earth, he wouldn’t have been a priest.(Hebrews 8:4)” As Freke and Gandy point out, had Paul considered Jesus historical, he would have said, “When Jesus was on earth, he was not a priest.” This explains why Paul never quotes the words of Jesus which he should have had there been a historical Jesus.
Paul further confirms that he considered Jesus’ crucifixion symbolic where he declares, “I have shared Christ’s crucifixion. The person we once were has been crucified with Christ. (Colossians 1:24, Galatians 2:20, Romans 6:7)” He also tells Galatians, a community that lived hundreds of miles away from Palestine, that they too witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion (Galatians 3:1). Since Paul had never met Jesus, the crucifixion his audience in |
